Monthly Archives: March 2017

My name is Israel Drazin, and I am a rabbi, biblical scholar, and a lawyer. My name is rather well-known in the military because I defended the chaplaincy of the US armed forces in court against two lawyers who claimed it was a violation of the establishment of religion clause of the US Constitution. I won and, as a result, President Ronald Reagan elevated me to the rank of brigadier general.

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The story I will relate here happened in 1986, when I had the privilege of meeting the Lubavitcher Rebbe. At the time, I was living in Columbia, Maryland, and because the only Orthodox synagogue in the area was the Chabad House, I began an association with the young rabbi there – Rabbi Hillel Baron. It was he who suggested that I might like to attend a farbrengen in New York and meet the Rebbe.

So I put on my uniform and went there. During the farbrengen, one of the chasidim came over and said that the Rebbe wanted me to join him on the dais. When I came up, the Rebbe spoke to me in a mixture of English and Yiddish, which I understood. He blessed me to be “a chaplain in God’s army” and then he said something startling:

“May the Almighty bless you … to influence the gentile soldiers, as well, in fulfilling the Sheva Mitzvot Bnei Noach – the Seven Noahide Laws. Certainly the other gentile chaplains will not be upset that you are mixing into their affairs, because you will actually be helping them. And all this will help bring our righteous Mashiach.”

“I will try to do that,” I responded, but it was a non-committal statement. I was thinking to myself, “It’s absurd that the Rebbe would expect me to stand before non-Jews and speak to them about the Seven Noahide Laws.”

While I knew, of course, about that these basic commandments  for all of humanity to live by – prohibiting blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, murder, theft and cruelty to animals, and mandating the establishment of courts of law – I could not imagine myself preaching this as a general in the armed forces. As far as I was concerned, it was a “no go” right from the very beginning.

But, when I had a chance to think about it some more, I said to myself, “Those things that seem to be the most difficult in life are the very things that one should try and do.” So I decided to try and do it.

After some thought, I developed a speech, which I tried it out first on a small Christian audience – and they liked it. The biggest compliment I received was that they wanted to invite me to address the Easter service. (more…)

I come from Kimyat, a small village in the Carpathian Mountains, from a region that has been variously controlled by Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Soviet Union and (currently) Ukraine.

In 1944, I was taken, along with my family, from Kimyat to various Nazi concentration camps, where my parents and my brothers perished though I survived. Three years after the war ended – once the State of Israel was declared – I volunteered for the Israeli Army and then worked for the Israeli Merchant Marine.

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In 1956, I came to Los Angeles where I got married and started a family. Although I was raised in a very religious home in Eastern Europe, I moved away from Yiddishkeit in the United States. Nonetheless, when it came time for putting my kids in school, my wife and I chose the Hillel Hebrew Academy, and we also joined Beth Jacob, an Orthodox synagogue in the area.

After a time, I befriended Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, the Rebbe’s emissary in LA, and began to help him out financially. As part of my association with Chabad – first with Rabbi Cunin and later with Rabbi Shlomo Aaron Kazarnovsky from New York – I embarked on a number of projects in the city. One of these was building a mikveh, another was building a school.

Around that time – it was in the late 1970s – Rabbi Kazarnovsky talked me into making a visit to New York to meet the Rebbe. I took my whole family with me – my wife and my four sons.

When we went in to meet the Rebbe, I expected we would say hello, get a blessing and say good-bye. In fact, I told my driver that we’d be out in ten to fifteen minutes. But that’s not what happened. It turned out to be a very long meeting.

First of all, the Rebbe looked at me and started talking to me in Yiddish, asking me about my background and my Torah learning. He figured out right away that I was a Holocaust survivor, and he urged me to write a book about what I had witnessed. “Don’t hire somebody else to write it; that won’t be good enough. You should do it yourself, and I am sure you will do a good job,” he said.

And I did just that. I wrote the original in English and it was published under the title: A Holocaust Survivor in the Footsteps of his Past. I then sent it to Yad Vashem where it was translated into Hebrew.

Then the Rebbe asked me what I had done in Israel. During the course of that conversation, I got the impression that the Rebbe had no political opinions where Israel was concerned. However, he was adamant that all of the Holy Land belonged to the Jews, and that no one had the right to give any part of it away. He said to me that the development of the Land was a partnership of secular and religious Jews – those who would sit and learn Torah and those who would work in the fields. (more…)

I was born in Israel but my parents moved to Crown Heights when I was only four, and I had the good fortune of growing up in the Lubavitch fold, in close proximity to the Rebbe.

In 1983, my wife Rivka and I had been married for a year already and we were exploring options of becoming Chabad emissaries someplace in the world.

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As a result, we set our sights on Columbia University and the Upper West Side of Manhattan. So we asked the Rebbe for his blessing and agreement. The Rebbe responded that this was a good idea, provided my wife agreed. Of course she did, and we went to work.

I started by setting up a hot dog stand at the gates of Columbia University, which was my outreach vehicle, and I also gave a class in Earl Hall on the Tanya, the seminal work by Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the 18th century founder of the Chabad Movement. Eventually we began expanding to other programs as well.

One year, when the holiday of Purim was approaching, I copied an idea from a fellow Chabad emissary by producing a Purim flyer which advertised a UPS (United Purim Service.) The flyer proclaimed “This is the whole Megilla” across the top, and which then went on to say that many Jews heard of Magilla Gorilla but most Jews never heard of the real “Megilla.” Magilla Gorilla was a popular kids’ cartoon in the 1960s, featuring a gorilla dressed in a bow tie, shorts held up by suspenders and an undersized derby hat.

It also said that, on Purim, Jews share in joy and revelry, and among many other things, it offered two kinds of Shalach Manot gift options — a $4.95 and $6.95, one was with grape juice, one was with wine — to be delivered by a clown on the campus during the Holiday of Purim.

I printed this flyer and, because I had a custom to submit everything to the Rebbe, I sent this also, never expecting any kind of response. But, within a few days, I was amazed to get a call from the Rebbe’s secretary that the Rebbe had edited my flyer. I went to Chabad Headquarters and saw that the Rebbe had made some significant changes.

First, the Rebbe crossed out “Magilla Gorilla.” I’m not sure why the Rebbe objected to it, but I suppose that he didn’t think it was necessary to mention pop-culture, especially in this context. Where the flyer said that “most Jews don’t know what a real Magilla is” the Rebbe crossed out “most” and substituted “not all.” He clearly didn’t want us making this kind of judgment about our fellow Jews. And where the flyer mentioned “joy and revelry,” the Rebbe crossed out “revelry.” Obviously, “revelry” has a negative connotation. (more…)